Business travel

In-flight rules

The Kindle conundrum

AIR TRAVEL can be a succession of annoyances. Some are inherent to the business. Unless you fly in your own jet or in first class, economics dictates that you will be squashed into a seat that is a few inches too narrow and too close to the one in front to be anything resembling comfortable after three hours. Some of the annoyances can be understood, even if only at a stretch of the credulity. Having one's "junk" felt probably fits into that category: it is not impossible to imagine someone trying to sneak a weapon or bomb onto a plane, and to imagine such a person being caught by or, more likely, deterred by the prospect of being groped by a large person wearing blue gloves. Let's call these the plausible annoyances.

Then there are the rules that are more annoying because the bar at which one has to suspend disbelief is raised even higher. One such might be the requirement to stash your earphones and switch off your iPod on take-off and landing. The logic is that you are being protected from yourself. If the plane is about to crash, you might miss the advice to “brace, brace, brace!” if you're listening to Rage Against the Machine on high volume. For a similar reason airlines are supposed to forbid passengers from wearing foam earplugs during take-off and landing. Another example might be the effective ban on taking knitting needles onto planes. The odds of even the most determined terrorist using them to take control of an aircraft seem rather long since the 2001 attacks on New York. We could call these the implausible annoyances.

Then there are those that are completely illogical and thus utterly infuriating. Take the ban on having a mobile phone switched on during flight. Every day thousands of phones are unwittingly left on in passenger aircraft, either in the cabin or tucked away in a suitcase in the hold. If they posed a real danger, even a remote one, to the safety of the flight, their switching off would be strictly enforced, with all phones being handed in before departure and all bags being searched for phones. Based on this observation, it is safe to say that phones pose absolutely no risk at all. And yet, illogical as the ban is, it is not a terrible inconvenience, since passengers don't expect to use their phones at 30,000 feet and normally can't.

It is the Kindle conundrum that really drives me dilly. My Kindle poses no greater danger to the flight while switched on than does the phone that I may have forgotten to switch off. Nor does reading it put me at any greater risk of failing to heed a "brace" command than would the reading of a gripping book. Yet the book is allowed while the Kindle is banned because it is an electronic device. And little will likely be done to solve the Kindle conundrum because the people affected are disempowered when it comes to making the rules, while the rulemakers have little incentive to make them less annoying. For no good reason, it seems as though the ban will persist for years.

dwight shrute: the last time that I traveled internationally into USA Atlanta airport, I had to pass through security upon exit. So it is already in process. I have to admit, that I felt immeasurably safer about walking around Atlanta, knowing that no one would be bringing bottled water onto the street, unless it was purchased locally.

I was asked to turn off my Kindle by a flight attendant, so I dejectedly switched it off. As any Kindle user knows, doing this results in a sort of "screen saver," pulling up a portrait of an author or picture which doesn't use any additional power to keep on the screen; such is the wonder of E-ink technology.

The flight attendant looked at it, and gruffly stated, "Sir, you must comply with FAA regulations. Please turn off your electronic device." Bewildered, I protested that I did, indeed, turn it off, and it wasn't drawing any power.

I attempted to explain the technology further, but was bailed out by a Kindle-owning flight attendant, who had the necessary authority to defuse this situation.

THe illogicality is stunning. Today, Frau Dingbat of the airlines Valkyrie division told me to stop reading my newspaper while she demonstrated how to use an airline seatbelt. When I responded that anyone who couldn’t work out by themselves how to use one shouldn’t be allowed out unaccompanied, she got very shirty and suggested that if I didn’t pay attention, I would be “deplaned”.

Later she came round and demanded I take my IPod earphones out and demonstrate to her that I had switched it off. This was apparently so I could now devote my full attention to the video safety broadcast. When I asked her to wake up the guy across the aisle, stop the woman over there reading her paper, and ask Bill and Ben to stop talking so they could pay attention too, I feared imminent deplaning.

Strange that they ran out of breakfasts just before they reached my seat.

There seem to be a couple of excellent reasons for banning cellphones in flight: (i) it protects us from annoying and over-loud calls in the next seat, and (ii) a jumbo load of active mobiles flying over a cellphone tower on the ground would cause the network considerable confusion as it tries to log them on, only to have most go out of range before connecting.

It would be easy to design an aluminum aircraft as a Faraday cage -- just don't put any windows in it. That should save weight, since there would be no need to reinforce the window frames in the fuselage.

@willstewart: "...the GPS system is not critical, or even used at all, during take off and landing! There are special ILS systems for that..."

GPS systems are used for approaches. As the IEEE Spectrum article stated in 2006, "GPS-certified landing approaches are now widely used in general aviation. Though most airliners presently use instrument landing systems, use of GPS technology will increase significantly over the next few years. There are three times as many GPS-certified approaches as instrument landing system approaches in the United States."

Since I am not cynical about the motives of my fellows, I assume that the writer of this article referred to "Kindle" because it is alliterative with "conundrum" and that most of the posters are just following suit. Were I cynical, this series of letters would lead me to suspect that most of the posters are on Amazon's payroll. Or has "Kindle" become almost a generic name in the USA, like "Hoover", or is it "hoover", in the UK?
They're called "e-book readers" and, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there are many manufacturers. I have one. It's not a Kindle and it doesn't have WiFi. I download books to my computer and from it to the reader. No problems. It's great for travel. The only practical way to take a library on a trip.
But I, too, have been told on airlines, to turn it off for landing and take off. It is no more of a hazard than a calculator or, as has also been pointed out, an electronic watch but there is no point in arguing abou it. No joy there and, at worst, one could get accused of being "disruptive" and be banned.
It seems that there is some sort of blanket prohibition of electronics or, perhaps, on "stuff-I-don't-understand". Whatever it is, it's just another bit of stage business in the security theatre.
Utterly pointless.

@dwight shrute
You clearly haven't landed at FCO (Rome) recently, where it seems to be standard procedure for arrivals to pass through the detectors. I assume that the Italians are concerned that I might smuggle a bomb off the plane and into the terminal.

In this blog and comments, the brand name "Kindle" is used extensively. To the blogger and commenters: do you also mean all other ebook readers ? Sony, B&N and other manufacturers make specialist ebook readers. I personally read ebooks on a number of devices : an HP iPaq PDA, an Eken Android tablet, my HTC "smart" phone and an iPad; I'll bring one or more of these along when I travel, depending on space and my whims. All have wifi capability, and all have an "airplane mode" which I usually engage before takeoff. I sometimes get asked to shut off the device, which I grudgingly comply with ... I sometimes feel as if this request is to force us readers to pick up the inflight magazine, so we can be exposed to the ads therein.

Being one of the lucky ones to fly first class from time to time, I had the opportunity to chat to the Captain of the Qantas A380 an hour or so prior to beginning our descent into Heathrow. He commented on my new iPad, asking me what I thought of it. He then told me that Qantas provide a specialised app for the iPad which has the approaches to major airports on it (new technology and graphics than what is available in the plane), and that he would be using his iPad to assist in his approach. So I guess there was at least one iPad on and working as the plane was coming in to land!!!!

Dumb question: Would installing a sufficient amount of material to turn the passenger cabin into a Faraday cage at the frequencies of interest (as described in the IEEE Spectrum article linked by another commenter) add so much weight to the aircraft as to be unworkable?

Yes, these rules about in-flight use of iPads, Kindle, iPods, iPhones are silly. Witness that Lufthansa started its "Fly-Net" System on board on some North Atlantic routes (available, I read, already now), to be implemented on most intercontinental flights by end of the year, which is a Wi-Fi set-up allowing passengers to use their above-mentioned, Wi-Fi enabled electronic devices, in all seating categories…at a price, of course…

I heard that the cause of the Lauda Airlines crash in Thailand about 10 years ago was that one engine went into reverse thrust when the plane was cruising at 35,000 feet resulting in a fatal instant spin. The reason the engine went into reverse was put down to a CD player being used close to the cabin wall behind which the control cables passed. Hopefully these cables are now better screened from interference.....

@swantonkid: How is turning off the e-book reader going to prevent it from flying around the cabin? As far as I know, all the airlines ask is for us to "switch off all electronic devices", not "switch off and safely stow". I'll concede the point would be valid, but it does not seem as though airlines are actually making it.

The reason to switch off your mobile phone in a plane is not a matter of your plane safety but for a more prosaic reason : mobile relays on the ground can't cope with hundreds of simultaneos requests to connect, and melt down under the attacks of what is no more than a massive DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service). Although cybernetic, this looks pretty much like terrorism by me.